Olivia Shakespear was the person through whom Pound and Yeats first
met. She was herself a writer. Her first book, Love on a Mortal Lease,
was published in June of 1984. Remarkably, by August of the same year she
had almost completed her novella Beauty's Hour. While trying to determine
the reading background for her character Dr. Trefusis, Yeats submitted several
suggestions. Shakespear however, had a different library in mind and Yeats
wrote to her applauding her choices. "I think you have chosen wisely
in making Dr. Trefusis read the mystics rather than the purely magical books
I suggested. The Morning Redness by Jacob Boehme is a great book
beautifully named, which might do, and The Obscure Night of the Soul
by St. John of the Cross is among the most perfectly named things in the
world" (Wade 234).

Between 1896 and 1897 Yeats and Olivia Shakespear had a love affair.
It only lasted a short while ending in early 1897. Yeats affections again
had reverted to Maud Gonne. She was the subject of Yeats's poem "The
Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love." They remained in contact for most
of their lives. According to Longenbach, the common bond that "sustained
them was the literature and practices of the occult" (84). In 1895,
Yeats wrote a letter to Shakespear attempting to help her with the interpretation
of her own visions. "The vision is correct in one thing and the rest
is merely the opening of a vision. I do not tell you what is right, or the
exact nature of the symbol you have used, because I will make the vision
complete itself when I see you, and it is best that it do all the explaining"
(Wade 256).

Olivia Shakespear died in 1938. Yeats wrote in a later letter that "For
more than forty years she has been the centre of my life in London and during
all that time we have never had a quarrel, sadness sometimes but never a
difference" (Wade 916).